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NIGHT SMOKE
by Bruce Boston and Marge Simon
illustrated by Marge Simon
Night Smoke contains 27 poems,
prose poems, and flash fictions,
and 15 full color illustrations,
all of a dark persuasion.
72 pages ISBN 978-0-9689934-6-0
$18 U.S. $22 Canada
Order from Kelp Queen Press
Also available at Amazon
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LESS THAN CHILDREN IN THE NIGHT
We are the unspoken,
the unnamed, the unbirthed,
rising up from the past
to roam the nightscare streets
of your stray imagination.
He said no kids or he'd leave me
and I said all right back then.
Now I've forgotten when sex was mutual.
Nights blurred by drink, he wakes me.
Sometimes you make your choices later....
Without breath, without graves,
never knowing taste or sensation
or the raw wail of hunger,
we dwell in the city of
children who have not lived.
I grieve because I'll never see you.
I gave permission to release you
from my womb as I knew you'd die
as painfully as I from this disease.
I pray you find another place in time....
We are the hands never dealt.
The dawns still unbroken
and days left unspent.
Gray eidolons who dance
at the corners of vision.
I've done it before. I'll do it again.
I need my figure more than I need this.
But the bastard better pay up front
or I'll tell his wife and family too.
Don't look at me like that....
No matter how fast
you turn your head
you will never apprehend
what we would have been
in life's alternate rendition.
Joey made me promise not to tell
when he took my hand to love me
in the dark while Mama slept.
But Mama knew and saw it in my eyes.
So it had to die for my brother's sake....
Burdens or savored pleasures.
Saviors or grim terrors
who could have hastened the
inexorable passage to the streets
to your own lightless city.
Afterward I go to the kitchen
choking back the old fears.
Yesterday the twins were three,
No room or money for more. Not now.
I stare at the oven a long time....
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"Dry Bar"
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"Less Than Children in the Night"
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"Conjuring Her Embrace"
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